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Friday, August 23, 2013

Number 1424: Boody Rogers’ Bigfoot sighting

A pair of tales from Sparky Watts #9 (1949) feature the oddball humor artist/writer Boody Rogers was known for. The scene of Sparky sharing a bed with the man he’s protecting, Buttermilk Sky, probably didn’t seem as odd in 1949 as it does now.*

The second story, a short and mostly pantomime strip features Sparky’s bigfoot pal, Slap Happy. I recently found this online, from a weird and vintage photography site

The unfortunate woman, Fanny Mills, photographed in the 1880s, was a victim of a hideously disfiguring disease, elephantiasis. I’m interested in her very large shoes. Since I’m always looking for comic artists’ inspirations, I wonder if Rogers had seen this picture, or something similar, and patterned Slap Happy after it? Boody’s explanation for Slap Happy’s feet was that he got the cosmic ray treatment from Doc Static, and it made his feet grow big. Or, it could be that Boody Rogers was just taking the slang term for old-time “bigfoot cartoonist” to an extreme.

*Sparky once shared a bed with Hitler in a two-part story! Click on the thumbnails to see.